Game Info
Game Name: Mega Man Legacy Collection
Developer(s): Backbone Entertainment
Publisher(s): Capcom
Platform(s): PS4/Xbox One/3DS/PC
Genre(s): Action/Adventure/Platformer/Compilation
Release Date(s): August 24, 2015
ESRB Rating: E
After all these years, I still hate the Yellow Devil…and with no NES Advantage, I stand little chance.
Meet Rock for the first time…again! The evil Dr. Wily is up to crimes by creating rebel robots to terrorize the citizens of the future. The only hope at stopping Dr. Wily could be Dr. Light’s creation Rock…aka Mega Man! Arming himself with the weapons he collects by defeating Dr. Wily’s creations, Rock could be the future’s only hope.
Produced by Capcom, Mega Man Legacy Collection is the first six games of the Mega Man series which were originally 8-Bit: Mega Man (1987), Mega Man 2 (1988), Mega Man 3 (1990), Mega Man 4 (1991), Mega Man 5 (1992), and Mega Man 6 (1993). The collection was released on August 24, 2015 for multiple platforms and available on Steam.
I played the original Mega Man into the ground along with most of the sequels collected here. Mega Man games were always notoriously difficult. I did finish the original Mega Man and the first sequel, but I don’t think I was ever able to make it through any of the following Mega Man games…and having the collection here, I don’t even know if I’ll finish the first two.
Speed run challenges are are ok, but I find the side art distracting
The gameplay remains faithful to the original. The trick to finishing any of the Mega Man games is knowing the “order” of which robots to take on since their weapons were often key to defeating other robots. It was this branching aspect of Mega Man which was kind of neat and different from a lot of the games on the NES. Getting through the levels sometimes were simply challenging and other times it was completely maddening. This has not changed with the new collection.
What has changed is that controls are slightly different. I felt that the controls sometimes lagged and aren’t as responsible as the original controls. With a lot of Mega Man relying on split second, timed jumps, this got a bit frustrating. It also had me yearning for my NES Advantage which gave you the nice cheat of “slow motion” and rapid fire which helped you defeat some of the trickier bosses. With the huge difficulty level of the games, I wish that more of a difficulty scale had been worked in to help.
Mega Man 2 showed a jump in graphics quality
The graphics of Mega Man games (minus the first game) were always better than many of NES’s games. The game really didn’t modify them but they do look clean and crisp. I wish that they had done shading and updating along the lines of what Nintendo did for the Super Mario All-Stars game which updated Super Mario Bros graphics to match closer with Super Mario Bros 3. It would have been nice to keep all the controls/movements with modified graphics. Borders that can be put on the 4×3 screens to fill out new TVs seem to be more distracting than helpful…just leave them off.
The Mega Man Legacy collection is a worthy purchase for fans of retro gaming. I do think that it could have been a great collection with a little more thought and work. With so many available downloadable retro games, it would be nice to have a really sleek look at the classic series. It did add a challenge page, but unlockable cheats, hidden games, and other bonuses would be great. I also hope to get a Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 with the Mega Man X games, some of the PS games, and Mega Man 7 through Mega Man 10.
